The Silver Spring Penguin

It’s a done deal: National Public Radio has chosen The District over Silver Spring for its new 400,000 square-foot world headquarters.

“Silver Spring is justly recognized as a welcoming location for media companies,” Ken Stern, NPR’s chief executive officer, said in a press statement. “We appreciate the interest and enthusiasm of the Silver Spring community and the Montgomery County officials who worked hard to bring NPR there.”

But “our interest in having all NPR staff in a single facility, rather than creating a satellite office downtown for news staff requiring duplicate costs and systems, ultimately affected our decision,” Stern explained.

NPR’s decision puts to bed a 19-month search for new digs in either Maryland, The District or Virginia. The broadcasting company whittled down its choices to a former Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co warehouse at 1111 North Capitol St (left), and a new building in downtown Silver Spring’s Ripley District, sandwiched between Georgia Avenue and the Metro tracks.

Montgomery County offered NPR about $32 million in permanent property-tax breaks and would have flipped the bill for an $18 million garage, The Washington Post reports. The county council also amended zoning laws so that office buildings in the Ripley District could exceed 200-foot height limits. The move was seen as a gesture to woo NPR into the area.

But The District also had incentives to sweeten the deal. According to the Washington Business Journal, The District offered to drop $40 million in property taxes for the next 20 years, and to fix the streetscape between the North Capitol Street warehouse and the New York Avenue Metro station.

“A major factor in our decision was the opportunity to play a role in the revitalization of NoMa [North of Massachusetts Avenue], much as we did 16 years ago as a pioneer in the Penn Quarter renaissance,” Stern said.

So what do NPR’s 600 regional employees get for all of this? A new 10-story office tower that incorporates the warehouse’s 4-story historic facade, for one. The new digs will also have a 60,000 square-foot space for NPR’s broadcast and multimedia operations, and a public space for live shows and events.

The facility should be in move-in condition by 2012, the company predicts.

Images: An NPR studio mic, courtesy of Flickr user and NPR employee Walsh. And an artist’s rendering of the new NPR building in The District (in case you care), courtesy of the J Street Development Co.

Updated Mar 6, 2008, at 10:10 a.m.